DREW HOLDEN: A COVID Autopsy, Part 4: ‘Social Distancing Informants Have Their Eyes on You.’ The defining legacy of COVID might be the social catastrophe that mitigation efforts inflicted.
The problem with all of this fear-mongering, all this confident predicting that six feet of space would protect us, was that there wasn’t any real science to back it up. Why was six feet so important? Where did that guidance come from? As Fauci would tell the House Oversight Committee in 2024, he made it up — the guidance “just sort of appeared,” the doctor in charge of America’s response to COVID said. As the Washington Examiner reported at the time: “Dr. Anthony Fauci said in congressional testimony that he reviewed no scientific evidence behind the specific recommendations for masking children or maintaining 6-foot social distancing before advocating these policies during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Invented though it was, social distancing, paired with the public doctrine of masking from the Left and among legacy media outlets, motivated a wave of hard-hearted and mean-spirited public cruelty for anyone who questioned The Science.
Do you remember the ‘Grandma killer!’ Twitter cycle about how awful it was to not wear a mask outside? (Here’s a thread if not). Have you forgotten all the awful things mask enthusiasts said about the “selfish” and “childish” people who so much as left their homes?
Do you remember the New York Times valorizing self-appointed social-distancing monitors? “Social Distancing Informants Have Their Eyes on You: Largely confined to their homes and worried about the spread of the coronavirus, members of the public are becoming unofficial watchdogs.”
Do you remember when legacy outlets like CBS News jumped in to support Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s Orwellian COVID hotline? “Coronavirus In Minnesota: Where To Call If You See People Who Aren’t Social Distancing.”
Holden’s Substack column was published on Friday, June 5th. Which seems appropriate, because it was in early June of 2020 that all of those rules got tossed out the window if you were protesting for the right cause: Six Years Ago Today, The Pivot Began.
